Nearly 150 workers losing their jobs amid partial closures at Auckland-based printing plant

Tuesday, 5 April 2022

Ovato is preparing to close part of its Wiri printing plant in the wake of supply chain issues.

Nearly 150 workers will be looking for new jobs this month amid partial closures at one of New Zealand’s large printing plants.

Ovato, which until 2019 was called PMP, intends to close part of its large printing plant in Wiri at the end of April.

Ovato management told workers on Tuesday that around 150 people will be made redundant from the heatset printing arm of the Wiri plant, which makes commercial catalogues and magazines.

It comes just months after the company closed its Christchurch branch in September 2021.

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Around 60 per cent of laid-off workers are E Tū union members.

Union delegate for Ovato Owen Sinclair said workers were in shock. Some have been with the company for 20 or 30 years.

“People are now going to have to work through what their entitlements are and when they’re going to finish,” he said.

“We’ll continue to work with the company to make sure we get that clarity for members.”

Ovato Manging Director Paul Gardiner said that by May there would be around 50 staff members left remaining at the company, with losses from across the company including at the executive level.

He said he was confident the company had done as well as it could for the approximately 150 people that have to leave and acknowledged it was “devastating.”

Gardiner said he had been in contact with other parts of the printing industry and believed there are many local jobs in Auckland that staff can be redeployed to.

E Tu negotiation specialist Joe Gallagher said the massive job losses come down to supply chain disruptions that rippled out from the closure of the Kawerau paper mill in June 2020, which caused 160 redundancies.

Major paper supplier Norske Skog was crucial for Ovato before it closed. The printing company has had to rely on imported paper ever since, which was both expensive and caused major delays in shipment.

Scheme would apply to workers who were laid off or had to quit jobs due to health conditions (video first published in February).

“If we rely solely on imported goods, this leaves us at the mercy of the international market to pay the asking price for those goods, which then ultimately trickles down to the working New Zealander,” Gallagher said.

Gardiner agreed the supply chain issues contributed to the closure of the printing plant, but added the die was cast back in March 2020, when New Zealand went into its first level four lockdown.

“We can put this down to a moment in time two years ago, when the government banned magazines and catalogues and regional newspapers. We’ve never really come back from that,” he said.

“We were only just coming back from that, and to have this other blow around global supply shortages of paper, we just didn’t have the reserves to be able to deal with it.”

Gardiner said the company would be a smaller and more specialised business, but he hoped it will be a more profitable one.

Gallagher said as supply chain issues spread across local industries, employers have to consider how to protect workers in the face of change.

“A Just Transition means things like creating plans for workers to retrain if necessary and to support them to transfer their existing skills to other roles. Initiatives such as the Government’s proposal for a national income insurance scheme, New Zealand Income Insurance, could also assist with this.”